“Armenia inherited the Soviet telecommunications system. The infrastructure was in poor condition, and electricity was scarce. In 1993 we had power for only one hour a day. At the same time, the world was undergoing a new revolution – the Internet revolution,” recalls Grigori Saghyan, board member of the Internet Society NGO.
Armenia’s entry into the Internet era and its acquisition of the right to manage the country-code top-level domain .am took place 32 years ago. This historic milestone was documented by the Internet Society, the manager of the .am domain, in a commemorative magazine marking its 30th anniversary and in the documentary “Our Space on the Internet”, based on firsthand accounts from those directly involved.
Saghyan notes that, despite the circumstances, several companies began connecting to the Internet, though only with great difficulty. The first was Arminco, which, using Soviet-era communication lines, managed to connect Armenia to the global Internet via Moscow – albeit at extremely slow speeds.
It was during this period that the group learned that IANA assigns two-letter country codes based on the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) reference list. The .am domain had been reserved for Armenia and was to be delegated once the country had developed the necessary professional and technical capacity to manage it.
Representatives from Arminco, the Yerevan Physics Institute, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Computing Center of the National Academy of Sciences and several other organizations – without any participation from the Ministry of Communications – joined forces to establish the Armenian Internet Users Association, which was granted the right to manage the .am domain.
The challenges in 1993 were substantial: there were no trained specialists, the operating system in use was UNIX, and there were no UNIX experts in the country. Nevertheless, driven largely by young professionals, the team quickly succeeded in organizing domain name management.
The first Armenian Network Information Center, AMNIC, was hosted at Arminco, an Internet service provider. The National Academy of Sciences played a crucial role in addressing technical needs by providing space for the installation of a secondary backup name server.
Importantly, from 1994 to the present day, Armenia’s domain management system has operated without interruption, relying on the expertise and dedication of its specialists. Armenian professionals continue to expand their knowledge, maintaining close and ongoing cooperation with international Internet governance centers and organizations.
The history of Armenia’s entry into the Internet and the work of the Internet Society NGO are also explored in the publication “It Was an Era of Explosion: We Worked by Combining Scientific Thought and Entrepreneurial Effort.”
